


The Man with Ice in His Heart

by FannyT



Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Evil Wins, For a while at least, Gen, Of the unhappy variety, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-11
Updated: 2014-02-11
Packaged: 2018-01-11 21:10:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1177968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FannyT/pseuds/FannyT
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Prince Hans thought he knew what he was doing. He thinks, now, that he won.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Man with Ice in His Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a gift for my little sister -- the Anna to my Elsa. Well, apart from the whole ice magic thing, and being orphaned royalty and battling forces from neighbouring countries and riding reindeer. 
> 
> But we're swedish, so there is that.

He was pleased when the princess turned to ice. It seemed poetic, somehow. She stood, one hand stretched up above her, the tears frozen on her face—every freckle still visible as a darker blemish in the clear ice, every hair a perfect line of frost. Her pretty mouth was slightly open, as if waiting for a kiss. 

Pathetic in death as well as in life. 

The queen was sobbing by the princess’s feet, her head in her hands and her back to Hans. His sword had shattered on the ice, but Hans never went so singly armed. Reaching slowly into one boot, he drew out the knife he had stolen, at nine years old, from his brother Hugo’s cold hand. 

Being thirteenth in line had always irked him. After his fourth brother had had his little accident, however, Hans had realised that the way of blood wouldn’t be practical. There had been whispers, and there had been servants who had started looking at him with fear in their eyes (although not for long—accidents were so very common in his kingdom). He had been forced to settle for a crueller form of warfare. 

Still, he hadn’t forgotten how to wield a knife. Queen Elsa’s back presented a lovely target. 

“Let summer come,” he said, as she gasped wetly, shuddered and fell. “I free Arendelle from your cold grasp, sister-murdering witch.”

There was a thundering crack behind him. He turned to see the man Kristoff and his ridiculous reindeer fall, screaming, into the chasm opening up in the ice. The fjord was singing with the weakening ice, deep tolls as from an underwater bell, and the frozen water was melting, breaking, and returning to summer’s freedom. For a moment Hans panicked, then, but he soon realised that although the ice beneath his feet was melting with the fall of the queen, below it were the deck planks of a ship. He smiled. He had always been lucky. No one had been there to see him push Henrik down the stairs. No one had watched him dose Harald’s wine. No one had even realised that the man who had attacked Hampus in the wood had in fact been his baby brother, the little princeling with the kind eyes and warm smiles. 

He smiled now at the ice princess, still standing guard over her still sister. She was melting away, too, her face wet as if with tears, the red of her sister’s life blood staining the clear ice of her dress. 

Hans leaned over her and pressed his lips gently to the frozen ones. 

“A true love’s kiss for you,” he said. 

He straightened up, then gave her a mock startled look. 

“Was that your heart I heard breaking?” he asked the frozen girl, and as he laughed, the princess shattered into a hundred pieces.

* * *

He thought he knew what he was doing. He thinks, now, that he won. He sits there, smug, in his summer’s castle on the edge of the sea. His new crown sits easily on his head, his kingly robes satin and lace, cool in the heat. The breeze is warm on his skin, the winter far away from his thoughts. 

He laments the loss of his princess, killed by her own sister. He curses his own hand, forced to slay his sister-in-law, the witch maddened by icy power. He tells sorrowful tales to the maids of neighbouring countries, a bereaved husband forced by fate to a terrible crime, and he accepts their gentle pity with grace. And he asks them about their own countries, about older sisters and brothers sitting on thrones not far away. 

He plots new murder in his icy heart while smiling his summer smiles. 

There is no snow here to match him, now. The sun is high, the weather warm and gentle. The sea outside his window is calm. 

He thinks he won. 

But King Hans clearly never thought this through. The spring flood contains all the fury of the ice. And the ocean remembers. 

It has drunk the tears of Princess Anna and the blood of Queen Elsa, and Kristoff’s bones and the sharp thorns of Sven’s horns, and it contains the ghosts of Hugo and Hampus and Harald and Henrik, and all the other betrayals and murders and victims of Hans’s cruel greed. 

The ocean waits, patiently and easily, until he thinks he is safe. The ocean watches him stroll in his pretty garden, his bloodied hands toying with a summer bloom. 

And now the waves rise.


End file.
